Picking a Package

Written by Hunter Jansen on October 29, 2014

It’s probably been too long since I’ve updated anything with SPO, for a variety of a reasons really
(Confusion, study week, and in class stuff, I like writing lots of words, etc) - but I’ll try to remedy that going
forward. But now, it’s time to choose and investigate packages to work on.

Though, I guess I haven’t really explained what I mean by ‘work on’, have I?

Work on What?

So the main point of the course/main project is to port projects to aarch 64 systems that haven’t been ported there
yet as part of the Linaro Performance Challenge. So we had a hangout with Jon
Maddog Hall, went over some very basics of architecture specific code and, how to find the bits that need updating.

So we all received a list of 10ish packages to investigate and see if they’re actually still outstanding. Following
that, we took some time to investigate packages that we thought we might want to take on as our porting project.

My Projects

In the hangout with Maddog, he advised that we might have more success if we were to pick a project that was in some
way related to stuff that interests us. So, me being me, I started off looking for JavaScripty things . . . Slim
pickings there, unsurprisingly. However, there was a package on the list: JSL: JavaScript Lint.

Seems a little weird that a linting program would have any architecture specific code in it,
so it’s interesting. I guess we’ll see in future entries what’s involved in the port.